Will One Company Conquer the Distributed Energy Space?

I have often suggested that I don’t see any single company ever dominating the distributed energy space with networking platforms such as microgrids. My recent Microgrid Leaderboard report, which ranks microgrid developers/integrators that offer their own distributed energy resource (DER) controls platform, underscores this point. All 15 companies that were ranked were, in the very least, contenders, with only three emerging as leaders according to this report’s criteria.

Some disagree. After this report was released, General Electric made a major announcement that raised some eyebrows, launching a new company called “Current,” an aggregation of existing business units currently valued at $1 billion. Jan Vrins, global energy practice leader here at Navigant, suggested in a recent blog this move positions GE in a role of the “network orchestrator,” a business model that may prove to be the most profitable over the long term.

Current is designed to bundle previously disparate business lines offering LED lights, solar PV, energy storage and electric vehicles into a single start-up located within the walls of GE.. Many in the industry are curious as to how this will play out, among them yours truly.

Whether talking about microgrids or “virtual power plants (VPP),” the other perhaps even more significant development in the DER space is the approval of the merger between GE and Alstom Grid. Why? While GE’s broad suite of products relevant to the microgrid space is impressive, its control platform was not its strongest suit. By incorporating Alstom Grid’s controls, which are repurposed from its platforms used by numerous wholesale grid operators throughout the world, it has now a platform aimed at the VPP portion of the distributed energy value stream: migrating value from distribution level resources up to wholesale operations.

I see GE recent moves aligning more with VPPs – a network orchestrator business model - than microgrids, in spite of its major presence in New York, the hotbed for retooling utility business models to allow utilities a greater role with DER aggregation and optimization via community resilience microgrids. Since Europe, including both France, Germany and Denmark are the current hotspots for VPPs, the GE-Alstom Grid merger is looking like a potential winner.

Yet there is plenty of competition. In Navigant Research’s recently published report, our ninth edition of the Microgrid Deployment Tracker, for the first time tallies up identified microgrid capacity by vender. Using that metric, ABB comes out on top. The bulk of these projects are remote microgrids in places such as Australia, islands off the coast of Spain and in Alaska. The same update shows, nonetheless, if one tallies up total projects, it is Schneider Electric that rises to the top. Coincidently, Schneider Electric ranked No. 1 in terms of the Leaderboard report, largely due to its partnership strategy on the controls questions, with firms as diverse as ETAP, Green Energy Corporation and DONG Energy among its co-innovators.

One also has to admire the breadth of solutions being offered by Siemens (which, BTW, happened to rank second in our Leaderboard.) By offering a complete end-to-end solution for microgrids, including financing, and integrating this approach with the vision of smart city infrastructure – Siemens is echoing the idea that microgrids become a complete infrastructure package. The worlds of microgrids and VPPs come closer and closer together over time.

So, the bottom line? I don’t see any one company dominating the microgrid/VPP space anytime soon. GE’s recent moves will go a long way in strengthening its role in the DER space, but it has plenty of competition. Left unanswered at this point in time is whether the network orchestrator role will indeed unlock the revenue streams to allow large technology players to innovate in the increasingly crowded distributed energy market. It looks like GE wants to find out.